Matter of life and death says author Maria Lewis

IT’S not about the money ... this former Gold Coast Bulletin reporter turned best-selling author’s success is motivated by higher stakes.

Maria Lewis supplied photos for Gold Coast Eye

THERE’S a question I’ve been asked a lot over the years. It’s kind of the default someone asks an extroverted girl of obvious ambitions: “what motivates you?”

Not to harsh collective buzzes here, but the answer for me has always been the same: death. Yessir, there ain’t no motivator greater than the thought of the Grim Reaper looming of your shoulders with a scythe glinting in the moonlight. And that, quite frankly, is not the kind of answer most people a) want b) expect or c) want to slap up on a motivational poster. Yet that’s my truth: mortality is my main motivator.

Taken out of context that’s enough to cause anyone to raise their hands in the air and cautiouslessly back away before My Chemical Romance starts playing at full volume.

Yet it has been a defining aspect of who I am as a person and what I’ve set out to do.

Growing up just outside of Arrowtown, New Zealand it was always stories with stakes that captured my imagination rather than fairy tales - and my family obliged.

Maria Lewis.

Horror stories replaced Hansel and Gretel (which is really a horror story in and of itself, when you think about it) and Jaws became not only the first movie I saw, but my favourite film forever after.

The thing I adored about horror stories, horror films, horror comics and horror novels - that stemmed from my love of them as a child and bloomed into full obsession as an adult - wasn’t the gore or gratuitousness, it was the stakes.

In Buffy if you had a bad day, you died. In the X-Men if things went topsy-turvy the world was likely to end. In X-Files the ultimate price a character could end up paying was being turned into an immortal liver-eating creature who lived in the sewers.

In real-life, that drew me to journalism — accidentally as it would turn out. In high school I bounced around ideas of what I wanted to do - a coroner one month, a photographer another — yet there was never one thing that I wanted to be.

It was the combination of my mother and teacher at school encouraging me to apply for a handful of scholarships and me deciding on the journalism one because it sounded “interesting”.

While parents and peers and pushers of people will tell you there are a lot of things you should look for when choosing a career — money, growth, opportunity, status — one thing they rarely mention is “interesting”.

Author Maria Lewis.

It’s a crucial thing, really, because finding a job that’s interesting and finding a job that you love is essentially the same thing. They’re intrinsically linked, because if you remain interested in what you’re doing — if you find a way to stay internally curious — then odds are you’ll love your job and prevent any midlife crisis where you suddenly quit and move to Nimbin to start an organic candle wax company. It happens.

Landing in a newsroom as a teenager was definitely that — especially at the Gold Coast Bulletin where I spent the first six years of my career writing about everything from fatal car crashes and kidnappings, to blockbuster films and a guy who once got his testicles caught in an industrial sander.

It became more than a job pretty quickly, with it encapsulating everything I loved to do all in the one package: talking to people, chasing leads, investigating details and writing. It also came with a lot of unexpected baggage. Police rounds aren’t meant to be easy.

You never truly leave a story at work because breaking news isn’t nine to five. And you think you’ll be prepared for things, when in reality nothing can prepare you for those Moments. I say Moments with a capital M because they deserve it. The first Moment for me in the job came when I was seventeen and called out to cover a car accident where there had been multiple

Author Maria Lewis.

deaths. Due to picking up the story on the police scanner almost instantly, I got out to the scene just as the cops had arrived and before the fireys were yet to make it.

Now I had seen dead bodies before: I spent a good fifteen years involved in the surf life saving community as a competitor and volunteer. Like any life saver growing up on the Gold Coast and stretched incredibly thin over an enormous piece of coastline with a high traffic beach population, I’d performed my fair share of rescues and resuscitations. Not all of them end in you waving off the survivor as they’re wheeled away by an ambulance crew. So yes, I had seen and touched a dead body before my feet met gravel on that highway but I had never experienced death in such a visceral way. I had never smelled death so strong that I thought I had a nosebleed for the week following the accident. I had never seen a dead body that didn’t resemble what a human being looked like any more and that, well, it was confronting. It was a Moment. The scene was so grisly that I ended up throwing out the shoes I’d been wearing that day as blood had soaked into the material.

In journalism, landing a fatal or going on your first ‘death knock’ is make or break for most reporters. I got through it the first time, and the second and the third and the Lord knows how many times but after years covering the beat I began to realise that writing about entertainment and pop culture would be more sustainable for my mental and physical wellbeing.

In fact, when I finally landed my dream gig of film reporter I remember rocking up to my final night shift on police rounds with a bounce in my step and the knowledge that this would be the last time I had to listen to the scratchy channels of the emergency scanner.

As a leaving present, fate saw me stuck in an elevator with a handcuffed double-murderer by the end of the shift after the cop on duty forgot to hold the door open so … swings and roundabouts, I guess.

The cover of Who's Afraid by Maria Lewis.

Morphing into a pop culture journalist was one hundred per cent my jam as I got to write very little about death and write a lot about creators and creatives that I loved, who had poured their heart and soul to making a piece of art.

To be fair, sometimes it was more fart than art but majority of the time you got to interview people who actually wanted to talk to you, who were passionate about their craft and — nicely — didn’t slam doors in your face. It was around this time that I got inspired to create my own thing — although I had no idea what it would become at the time.

Who’s Afraid? is my debut novel and it’s something that’s currently on shelves everywhere from Dunedin and Sydney, to Japan and London. It became a bestseller within 24 hours in Australia which is a sentence I get so much sweaty excitement from being able to type that I need to have a shower. Okay I’m back.

The origin story of the book is rather basic: I was researching another idea for a graphic novel about Egyptian mythology when a character strutted into my head and refused to leave. That character was Tommi Grayson, the heroine and central protagonist of the Who’s Afraid? series which will play out over five books released throughout the next few years. She was a fully-formed being with complexities and flaws and a personality. After politely ignoring her for a few weeks, I eventually began crafting a world around her. Publishing a novel was something I never seriously considered as an option as this was my first exercise in writing creative fiction. Originally it was just to see if I could do it, pumping out chapter-by-chapter and giving it off to my colleagues in the newsroom at the time to read. The intended audience was only ever them, yet with their encouragement and belief that Who’s Afraid? could be “something more” that’s what it became.

They’re the ones who sent me on six year quest from writing that first draft to my story about a werewolf grappling to manage her power to landing on bookshelves around the world.

And it nearly didn’t happen. Enter the Grim Reaper, stage left. When I was 22, I had a T.I.Awhich is known on the street (nee medical community) as a ministroke.

This came as a shock to me firstly because ow, it was incredibly painful. Secondly because I don’t smoke, don’t drink, have no family history or risk factors. And thirdly because I was in my early twenties. Strokes were an ‘old people’ thing, I originally thought. They’re not, with thirty per cent of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who have strokes each year being under the age of sixty.

Yet at the time I thought it was more likely I had a brain tumour. For a terrifying period of a few weeks it took away my most treasured ability: communication. Then it took my peace of mind. Often you have no warning that a stroke is about to hit. There are indicators when you’re actually having the stroke, but by then it’s too late: there’s no way to stop it and your best chance is getting to a hospital for treatment within an hour.

Maria Lewis.

There’s also the fact that once you’ve had a stroke, your chances of having another are dramatically increased. Which put me in a weird place: a twenty-something with a lot she wanted to do and not a whole lot of time to do it (hypothetically speaking).

Who’s Afraid? went from being that hobby I had on the side to being everything. I rewrote the novel, changed its setting, began hunting for an agent and publishing deal in earnest and then wrote the next three books in the series over the blurred course of a few years. When I did finally land an international multi-book publishing deal at 25 with Little Brown in London, I developed a very distinct fear that I would die before ever getting to see the book in print or on the shelf.

Important life update: am now 27, Who’s Afraid? has been out for months, still not dead. Either the Grim Reaper took a vacay, has more important things to do or simply forgot about me. Yet making it over that one threshold has just created another. Death is still my biggest motivator. The first four books in the Who’s Afraid? series are written, with the second novel dropping in January 2017. I still have one big finale to write, with three books in other suitably bonkers series done and ready to go. There’s interest in adapting Who’s Afraid? for the small screen as a TV series and, generally speaking, a lot of s*** I want to be around for. Someone reading this will interpret my mantra as ‘live every day like it could be your last’ and I would strongly advise against that. Because it’s bulls***. Live every day like it’s you last? That would be exhausting, having to shag Ryan Gosling and Idris Elba while managing to chow down on the greatest burger ever made and surf the cleanest wave to ever grace Snapper Rocks? It would be impossible and unsustainable. Did I mention exhausting? Instead, I like to think of it as ‘care mortem’ — seize death. Or, as Buffy Summers said it best, “Seize the moment, ‘cause tomorrow you might be dead.”